


Disintegration

by Anonymous



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Body Horror, Character Death, Gen, Guilt, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:35:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25767553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: There’s an unknowable horror in her quivering lips. Then, almost humor. She says, “oh.” And then the green halo opens up around the pin-prick void in her chest. It expands, leaving greyed-out insubstantial flesh and fabric. The sickly green travels across her form invasive, infectious, inexorable. Then, like long-burned paper exposed to the barest of breezes, the colourless form is set adrift.Episode 105 alternate ending.Thatdice roll goes the other way.
Comments: 19
Kudos: 75
Collections: Anonymous





	Disintegration

There’s an unknowable horror in her quivering lips. Then, almost humor. She says, “oh.” And then the green halo opens up around the pin-prick void in her chest. It expands, leaving greyed-out insubstantial flesh and fabric. The sickly green travels across her form invasive, infectious, inexorable. Then, like long-burned paper exposed to the barest of breezes, the colourless form is set adrift.  
  
Jester is gone.  
  
Caleb sees the same house fire he always returns home to. It’s been waiting for him. His oldest, most intimate acquaintance. He doesn’t hear the shouts and screams of his friends, the fight continuing, the bellows and the screeches of the hideous thing he’d meant to disintegrate. He hears the too-familiar screams of his mother and father as they perish, again, and again, and again. Every other vocal intonation is lost to the all-consuming final memory. How did she say his name? How did he whisper good night? Those things are forgotten and Caleb has only their screams as keepsakes.  
  
Is this how it will be with Jester? No joyous pranks and sweet laughs and too-thoughtful questions-- just her mouth open, just the word ‘oh’ as he kills her again, and again?  
  
The flames seem to leap and jump at the horrifying thought. Bare wood walls peel and pop. The thin brushwork of floral detailing over the mantle bubbles into unrecognisable oblivion. Windows-- wooden shutters, couldn’t afford glass-- bellow open with displaced, hellish air within.  
  
“Get up.” Caduceus looks angrier than Caleb has ever seen, though perhaps not all at him. The hand on his shoulder is gentle enough.  
  
“Where is she?” Beau asks, in a high, strangled voice. “Caleb--”  
  
He recognises his own name, at least. He wets his lips even though he’s still underwater. “She’s-- she’s--” Caleb begins in a halting, inhuman rasp.  
  
“Disintegrated?” Beau cuts him off. “No shit, I know what that spell is called. But where the fuck is she? What do we revive? Do we collect up that-- that--” she gestures erratically towards the gradually settling particles.  
  
“I don’t know,” Caleb says, though he does. He hadn’t thought, in that moment, about the difficulty of a resurrection. High on his own arcane mastery, on the bloodthirsty satisfaction of this nearly felled foe. That risk was always there, always apparent; he’d understood the spell redirection, seen the arcane energy skate off the thick, aberrant hide.  
  
Behind Beau, Fjord still holds the unsheathed Star Razor indecisively. Caleb remembers another blade at his throat, a falchion by his jugular-- is that what Fjord is thinking? Of killing him? Caleb tries to passively will it so.  
  
The harsh lines unwind themselves from Fjord’s shoulders, and he sheathes his sword. He turns and swims over to the dust to pick up the fallen magical items, one by one. He lingers, fingers scrabbling against the rocky, grey floor. As if he’ll find some of Jester’s remains pooled amongst the underwater detritus. There is only dust.  
  
She is only dust.  
  
“We have to get out of here. If we go down in this heat, we’ll all die. Come on. Up,” Caducueus says with bland urgency, as if to a very sick person, or to a child.  
  
Caleb isn’t participating in the attempt to raise him off the ground.  
  
“You have to fix this. You can’t fix anything if you’re boiled to death by a volcano,” Caduceus explains matter-of-factly.  
  
Caleb tries to swim upright but there’s no strength in his trembling arms. He feels scars tingle and twitch with what must be psychosomatic pain. The house fire is still ablaze behind his eyes.  
  
“What are you doing?” Beau asks unkindly, across the infernally boiling cavern.  
  
“We brought it back from the Astral Sea for the loot on its back,” Nott-- Veth says, in an eerily practical tone. Her eyes are red and unfocussed, but she seems efficient nonetheless as she examines the treasure pile atop their slain foe. “If we have to pay someone to fix her, we’ll need all the valuables we can get.”  
  
Fjord seems to have given up on finding any essential trace of Jester Lavorre. He swims towards the conversation, and begins to hurriedly select the most precious looking objects nestled amongst the bloodied husk of Vokodo. Then, Yasha too, prying apart larger finery to drag handfuls of glinting chains and weaponry and gemstones free.  
  
Vilya's aquatic form skims past, towards the tunnel.  
  
Abruptly Caduceus’ almost-comforting hand is swept aside. Beau grabs Caleb’s waterlogged collar and drags him back towards a cavern wall, shoving him against it and churning the too-hot water. She raises a glowing fist to his lax, stubbled jaw.  
  
“Beau, don’t,” Caduceus says, serious but tired.  
  
Beau’s eyes twitch away then back. Her tension-paled, radiant knuckles stay tightly bunched in the fabric.  
  
“I don’t mind,” Caleb eventually remarks.  
  
Beau’s lip curls. Her fist wavers, and Caleb finally sees that the brown skin has been mottled vicious pink and charcoal black with battle-earned burns. “Fuck you. You reckless, selfish--”  
  
“He didn’t mean to hurt her,” Veth calls across in a cautious, or cautioning, tone.  
  
Beau drops Caleb as if disgusted. “We have to get out of here and figure out what the fuck our next move is,” she says, though her grating voice belies the certainty.  
  
Fjord nods. This stoicism ill-befits the open-hearted man Caleb has come to know. It seems like regression towards a lonelier life. He stows a few more golden trinkets and then kicks away, an elegant, magically-assisted swimming technique. Everyone, rushing to escape the wet heat.  
  
Caleb feels fingers brush against his back as Veth passes towards the tunnel out. “It’s okay. You remember that time I shot Caduceus with an explosive arrow and I killed him? It’s like that,” Veth says softly, though there’s a new scowl line forming between her dark brows. “It’ll be fine; you’ll figure something out.”  
  
It’s nothing like that, because Jester was there to bring him right back. Now, Jester is gone. She’s gone, _she’s gone, she’s gone--_  
  
“What?” Veth asks, and Caleb realises he was chanting the words beneath his breath.  
  
He turns around and begins to swim away from the empty, cursed cavern.  
  
Swimming is easier, because he is exhausted just keeping up, and nobody is looking at him. His scars tingle with the seawater like they are fresh wounds. His mind spins, reels, latching onto every being he could strike a deal with. Essek. Isharnai. Trent. The Traveler. His soul for her. Exandria, for her. They reach an intersection and suddenly Caleb realises that every eye is upon him.  
  
He points left without speaking.  
  
Another three times, he silently gestures the group towards the exit, through the mass of tunnels he has perfectly seared into his brain. Nothing forgotten, not the sprawl; not the whites around her eyes when she realised what was happening to her.  
  
As they trudge out of water and onto the unfriendly stone cavern. Woodsmoke still hangs thick amongst the untouched boats. But an austere, green-cloaked figure has preempted their arrival. “What happened?” the Traveler asks in a deceptively mild tone.   
  
“Can you bring her back?” Beau asks, without even the thinnest veneer of deference.  
  
“Oh, I am not in the mood to be _demanded of_ right now--” the Traveler begins.   
  
Beau fires right back at the ancient being, unthinkably powerful being. “You fucking _promised_ her you wouldn’t leave her here--”  
  
“It was my spell,” Caleb says. His voice is oddly strong to his own ears. He can’t let Beau get hurt too. “It was an accident. A disintegrate spell. You’ll need a very powerful resurrection magic to--”  
  
The archfey is gone.  
  
“--bring her back,” Caleb finishes, faltering.  
  
“Idiot. Are you trying to get killed?” Beau snaps.  
  
_Maybe._ “Are you?” he responds, coolly.  
  
Beau storms off all of ten feet.  
  
It’s decided they wait for the Traveler in the cave, even though an almost-god could surely find them on any plane. They rest. Everyone seems to have succumbed to a more back-breaking gravitational field than before, moving through the air as if through viscous poison.  
  
Caduceus is making tea.  
  
Vilya informs the slumped, silent group that she needs to check on the other islanders. She doesn’t point out that, without Jester, they could not all fly across the island. Caleb does the maths anyway.   
  
An hour and fourteen minutes and thirty seven seconds pass with no substantive conversation. Then, Veth and Beau tersely debate options, should the Traveler fail. Yasha chimes in her wistful, broken voice. Caleb has already decided what he will do. Isharnai. Offer everything and anything. He stays several feet away from the conversation hunched over his spellbooks, studying the arcane runes that align and configure the transmutative properties. Disintegrate. His own geometric, ink sketches of the component, the musing note wondering at the meaning of a tower as a focus--  
  
“I had to call in some very unpleasant favours to bring her back,” announces the velvet timbre of the Traveler.  
  
Caleb jerks out of his miserable, intellectualizing reverie.  
  
“She’s alive?” Beau asks, springing to her feet.  
  
“Alive, safe, sleeping. She is away from this island. But, ‘technically’--” the impersonation of Jester is disconcertingly accurate, and heart-wrenching at once. “--I promised to get you all off the island. I am held to it by forces greater than you or I.”  
  
“So where is she, then?” Fjord says. It’s the first words Caleb can recall him saying since she fell.  
  
“Safe, as I said. All this adventuring is such a terrible risk, I really should have intervened sooner in her--”  
  
“I killed her. Bring her back, and I’ll leave,” Caleb says roughly. “She’ll want to be with them. She’ll be safe, with them. She doesn’t want to be your prisoner.”  
  
The archfey turns on him in whirl of ethereal red curls and green fabric. Caleb feels a strange, overfilled sensation low in his ribcage. A presence that shouldn’t be there. Then the odd, uncomfortable sensation becomes mind-searing agony. He claws at his own throat, which ruptures into gore-smeared buds and leaves. There’s a sensation inside him that he can only describe as blossoming. From the dip of his collarbone erupts another green tendril.  
  
“You did kill her. I thought you were supposed to be the clever one, but you’re not all that clever if you willfully remind me of that fact,” the Traveler says.  
  
“Stop it,” Beau growls, shoulders loosening, feet sliding into an offensive stance. He sees Veth’s fingers slide to her crossbow. Even Fjord is reaching for his sword, and Caleb isn’t sure that Fjord doesn’t want him dead.  
  
The Traveler pays the adventurers no more attention than the ants Jester reasoned them to be.  
  
Caleb coughs flower petals and fibrous green stems and clumps of arterial-red blood. "Don't," he says, to his friends. He's not sure they understand. He feels his consciousness slipping away like silk on silk, and it feels like mercy.  
  
Then his chest is smarting and empty. A green light tingles across the bloody rend on his neck and Caleb feels vitality unwelcomely return. He spits up a last mouthful of plant matter, already disappearing into arcane wisps as it spatters on the sand below. The dripping blood is clotting too fast, healing amidst the radiant green.  
  
The source of the healing energy is the long, artfully crooked fingers of the looming archfey. “You think you get to die on me?” the Traveler murmurs pleasantly. “You think this is the sort of trivial little mistake that one measly human life squares away?”  
  
“You were the one who sent her here,” Caleb spits, clawing himself most of the way upright. “Part of one of your fun little games, right?”  
  
“I met the most fascinating mortal once. I killed him, and he didn’t die-- or maybe he did, but he was already dead. Perhaps we could arrange some kind of similar--” the Traveler stops talking. His eyebrow raises, then lowers. The hateful, smirking smile becomes something frighteningly genuine. “It’s just the Feywild, Jester. I’ll be there in a moment. Don’t you fret.”  
  
Caleb recognises the guilt. And the love. His head bows.  
  
The Traveler regards him imperiously for one second, then disappears yet again.  
  
“Has he kidnapped her?” Veth asks incredulously.  
  
“Stop trying to get yourself killed,” Beau growls down at Caleb, her arms folded into a twist of taut muscle. “I’m not going to let it happen.” For all the current show of anger, there is a weightlessness, a giddiness to her entire being.  
  
Caduceus steps closer to Caleb, brushing some congealing blood from his lips. “Easy, easy there. Can you send her a message?”  
  
“Not-- not today. Tonight. But I should--” Caleb whispers, holding his own, healed throat.  
  
He hears Yasha’s soft gasp, and stops dead.  
  
Two figures, or rather, one figure and a haloed embrace of something not entirely there. The Traveler’s form is incorporeal, never quite settling into the world. He shivers out of existence like sunlight hitting fog. But the tiefling is substantial and unfading. Jester Lavorre, barefoot and dressed seemingly in only an otherworldly-sheened green cloak, stands before them.  
  
Beau is first to reach her, with a sweeping tackle around her neck, almost as if they're in one of their boisterous bar brawls. Then Veth, grabbing desperately onto the green cloak as if trying to halt a runaway; Fjord, half-behind Beau, leaning on her blue curls and the ridged horn; Caduceus, thin arms tufted with pink encircling the group; Yasha’s half-kneel to Jester’s level, a binding kiss pressed into her forehead.  
  
“Oh, no, it’s fine. The Traveler promised, you know,” Jester says, from within the tangle of intertwined limbs. “Nobody cry or I’m going to cry, okay?”  
  
Beau is already bawling. Fjord might be, too.  
  
She looks over at Caleb, still on his knees several feet away. Her head tilts, and her endlessly bright eyes dance with uncomplicated joy. “Oh my god, that spell would have been _so_ _cool_ if it had worked on Vokodo, Caleb. And then it rebounded, and I was like, no way, that’s me, oh poop--”


End file.
